Every year of the information age bears witness to the continued development of more ways to allow people to communicate and disseminate information. However, person-to-person voice communication over a telephone remains one of the most effective and preferred ways for people to communicate. Even when people use the internet to search, they often follow up their search with a phone call. Indeed, market analysts have found that 48% of local mobile web searches end with a telephone call. Furthermore, inbound telephone calls are rated as the highest quality form of sales leads because people will only tend to call a business when they are almost ready to make a purchase for goods or service. Telephone calls therefore represent a high value potential sales channel for businesses and a high value information channel for individuals.
Despite the high value of the information generated by voice interactions for both customers and businesses, the useful data associated with a voice interaction is generally lost once a call is concluded. This is particularly true for individuals and small businesses who can't afford enterprise-grade call management systems. Furthermore, for all their benefits, voice interactions can fall short in certain tasks where visible communication, augmented by simultaneously sharing data content, could be more efficient such as displaying a person's name, a restaurant order, an image of a product offering, or a credit card number to someone who is using the information to complete a transaction.